5 The Screening Call and Behavioral Interview
This chapter covers
- Acing the four challenges of the screening interview
- Handling situations when the recruiter's incentives are not aligned with yours
- Succeeding at the two main types of behavioral interview
- Rehearsing for success with humans and LLMs
Once your resume has attracted the attention of recruiters or hiring managers, they will call you to do some additional assessment of how good a fit you are for the job. During this screening call, you also get the opportunity to ask questions and get more information about the role.n If all goes well in the screening call, they send your resume to the hiring manager. After this step, you can usually expect an interview with someone in the company.
The behavioral interview, sometimes called a competency-based interview, consists of questions requiring real work examples. It assesses whether you have enough experience for the job and whether you react to specific situations that are important to the employer. In fact, these kinds of questions may appear anytime during the hiring process, from your first call with the recruiter to your last interview. For the sake of simplicity, we will assume these questions are coming to you during the behavioral interview.
In this chapter, we will see how recruiters and hiring managers carry out their assessments in the screening call and the behavioral interview, focusing on the best ways to prepare for and answer their questions.